Using the SCIO in gardening

Ages ago, I funded a kickstarter for a “consumer molecular scanner”. It’s a pocket spectrometer of sorts that can be used with your smartphone to analyse the chemical composition of just about anything. It works by spraying an object with photons from an LED on the device. Different chemicals react differently with different wavelengths of photons. On the device is a sensor, that analysis which photons bounce back.

The android app that you use with the device, communicates over bluetooth to read data. Data is then sent to the cloud for analysis. What comes back is a spectrum that represents the object. Included in the app are a number of applets for doing things from estimating body fat to estimating the BRIX rating of a fruit product. You can also create your own “mini-applet” to capture and analyze your own objects.

Tomato leaf deficiency mini-applet

I wanted to create a mini-applet to analyse tomato leaves and perhaps identify any deficiencies. I started with some healthy leaves and took some scans. Unfortunately, I need to produce leaves with known deficiencies, scan those leaves and name those scans after the deficiency for this to be really useful. I did however, notice some strange leaf formation, took some scans and the results were different than the normal “healthy” leaf. If I can identify this as a nutrient deficiency, I’ll have a good way of identifying it moving forward.

Produce Selector applet

This is a built-in applet that allows you to scan your favorite fruit and get a BRIX rating. BRIX is basically the sugar content in a solution. Unfortunately for this applet, it didn’t recognize any tomato I scanned :(. I scanned my unripe fruit and the store bought roma tomato. I provided feedback via the app to the developers. I hope there will be an update soon.

Fruit and Vegetable applet

This applet lets you estimate the carb content in the fruit or vegetable. I used this on my unripe tomato growing in my greenhouse. It came up with 5% carbs.

I snapped a picture of the fruit and I’ll be able to check later for changes. I’m exciting to see what happens over time with these readings. Here’s the “spectral fingerprint” from my phone (5/10/17):

For comparison purposes, I scanned a store-bought roma tomato. The readings were identical from what I can tell and I’m not sure exactly what that means yet, but another scan of my greenhouse fruit when its ripe might reveal something.

Conclusion

The SCIO is pretty fun. I foresee it will be very useful moving forward to help identify plant and fruit quality.